The sing-for-your-supper portion of morning writing is over — some bullshit survey for [CCNY’s] Univ[ersity] Fac[ulty] Senate [about adaptations to emergency remote teaching during COVID-19], but it allowed me to then write T— and share the 4/16 freewrite handout.
April 24 2020
Early morning is a delicate time. The thin membrane of concentration that allows the smooth transition from the actual dreaming of, well, dreaming to the awake-dreaming of writing can be punctured by any number of things.
I think here of the very means that wakes a person up: the alarm on a cell phone. Because there is so much else on a cell phone to pull one into singing for supper, even before breakfast. I wonder if that’s what happened this morning a year minus two days ago, in the middle of the first spring of early remote teaching, an email from T–, who was my boss, the person who I emailed for years trying to get an adjunct job at his college, the person who some four months before this had basically fired me the way a college fires adjuncts, by putting them at the bottom of a long list, just behind “_____”, where “_____” represents “anyone else we like better than you ever.”
So yes, the sing-for-your-supper portion of morning writing is a constant threat, just as much as the whine-for-their-breakfast portion that has derailed me for much of the last few months.
About the handout. Just the mention of it makes me think about the ‘real talk’ we had in class the other day. This period in the Spring semester is always a special one; post-break, pre-finals, it’s that sweet spot when the students who have been putting in the work finally see it pay off (and where those who haven’t panic). We’re finally able to start having metacognitive discussions, like happened in class yesterday, when we talked about the George Floyd verdict and the function of research in our lives outside of ENG 121.
One of my ‘repeat customers’, a student I like a lot, said that our class ‘didn’t seem like an English class.’ Mostly, I take this as a compliment, a reference to how real-world and current the content is. But I also think we’ve gotten away from a lot of writing instruction as we’ve been focused on the group work and the audience building. I had a hunch a while ago to rein that in once we move to looking at the essays themselves, and that’s been affirmed with that comment.
Reading back through this handout summing up and responding to their freewrite (with students’ names deleted), I see why I thought it would be at all useful to my college as a whole. Students articulate in it what they think an “academic space” is. It’s heartbreaking to see how stuck we all still are in this loop of Zoom-from-home (or wherever), and how far Zoom gets us from the feeling of that space. Other digital tools, in the right combination, can do a lot to create a space. The problem with Zoom is it’s trying to match ‘live’ school, and it just can’t. Part of the ‘aura’ of college has to do with one’s removal from the space where they typically exist.
It’s not that this “aura” is always even positive. The picture above is so 19th century, so teacher-centered, so institutional. But is also has a seriousness, a gravitas that one’s living room doesn’t. It takes you halfway to concentration just because you’re out of your element, because you’re forced to make this your element, to bend what’s so rigid and traditional to meet the world you’re in. The contact between individuals and institutions is the site where the world that has been meets and is formed into the world that can and will and should be.
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